Props to Dan Pontefract who pretty
much inspired this whole post about the mashup of Andy McAfee’s Enterprise 2.0 notion
and Learning 2.0. This is to contribute to Dan’s argument to help bring this
word, “Learnerprise” from lonely neologism into the general vernacular.

The first steps of the emergent Learnerprise organization must include
federating the LMS
and integrating learning opportunities ubiquitously throughout the organization
in rich social media environments. But to ensure success, the savvy
Learnerprise architect has to understand that whatever opportunities are
provided, formal or informal, they are competing against not just their own
learning offerings, but also the wild social web.

Let’s unpack this. Any learning opportunity
initiative – let’s say the corporate university just released a presentation
coaching two-day classroom workshop on presentation coaching, coupled with a
communications e-learning certificate package, and supplemented with an
informal use-as-you-choose books/video library on effective presence, and promoted in a push campaign
alerting associates of that availability – must understand that it is competing
with a compendium of other resources that the now-socially empowered free agent
of the organization can reasonably garner from any number of outside resources.

And so, to build a compelling webscape of learning, we need to create
mechanisms for the collective wisdom of our colleagues to enhance the intrinsic
drive of those we hope to inspire and change. Remember it’s the intrinsic
personal interest that we need to be enabling in eventual service of the
organization, not what we think people need to be learning. That is, the
learning organization (the new Learnerprise) shall provide the environments and
opportunities in which people can satisfy their own emergent drives and
interests to learn.

Recognizing intrinsic drive suggests that ideas and skill-development
resonate not when the royal ‘we’ of organizational learning thinks it needs to
happen, but rather when people are ready, willing and eager to absorb and
integrate new ideas into their behaviors. This – which is why a
group of people can participate in the same learning campaign, and yet only a
portion of that audience find stickiness, and — ah-ha! — Which again,
explains why despite the best efforts of the learning organization assigning
prescriptive learning, only a portion emerge effectively engaged in the
“intended” outcomes.

Clearly now in the conceptual age, following the readily available knowledge
age, to remain relevant, learning initiatives need to engineer in all varieties
of disparate possibilities for the individual to parse what matters to them,
and to apply to their work.

“Personally, I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being
taught.” – Winston Churchill